Pan-European architectural awards and prizes are influential platforms for the evaluation of architectural quality. The jury is a key element in the evaluation of such awards. The jury's evaluation of values in architecture influences not only the laureates by awarding them prestige, but also the architectural discourse on a wider scale. The awarding of prizes in architecture can be said to be transformative. Through a qualitative analysis of jury verdicts, our work attempts to reveal the current evaluation criteria of European architectural awards through two case studies. Our case studies are the Mies van der Rohe Award - European Prize for Contemporary Architecture and the European Prize for Urban Public Space. We focus our analysis on the written outputs of these platforms: verdicts, statements and essays of the juries on the prizes in quest ion. These data represent a comprehensive set of information on the editions of the awards used. Since one edition from each award would not be a representative sample, we analyze three editions within each award. Thus, one architectural award – one case study, is represented by three editions. Methodologically, we use one of a group of research designs, an established combination of methodological procedures, for our qualitative analyses. In our research, we are talking about the Qualitative Content Analysis. The basic procedure of this research design is a method called Text Segmentation and Coding. Our results of the research so far suggest that evaluation criteria can be identified and described. The results further suggest that differently focused architectural awards have different sets of evaluation criteria.